Chinese culture and software copyright

This article explores the impacts of Chinese culture on users’ attitudes and intentions about software copyright and piracy. The findings reject the pervasive position that Chinese culture resists software copyright and encourages piracy behaviors. Instead, the study reports that Chinese culture has no significant impact on users’ intentions to use pirated software programs. Meanwhile, collectivistic and individualistic cultural components are found to coexist in the Chinese value system. The users with higher scores in the collectivistic component have more negative attitudes towards software companies, while the users with higher scores in the individualistic component have less negative attitudes towards software products. The coexistence of individualistic and collectivistic components prevents software users from falling into either direction of supporting or opposing software copyright and calls for a balanced account between software owners and users.